Nancy Carol Moody

SPEECHLESS

Crows in clamor on the alley fence
flap their wings in Cyrillic—
black gesticulations on white
suggesting spider and ruin,
malevolent lacework, end-
stop of crossbone and stanchion.

If language is racket of silhouettes
scrapping against blight,
what to make of these muffled alphabets
our bodies wrangle in the night?

Broken-jawed, wide-mouthed—
we waged ourselves before sound.

About Nancy Carol Moody

Nancy Carol Moody's work has appeared in The MacGuffin, The New York Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and Salamander. She is the author of Photograph With Girls (Traprock, 2009) and has just completed a new manuscript titled Negative Space. Nancy lives in Eugene, Oregon, and can be found online at
nancycarolmoody.com.